


Step With Me

by Anonymous



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Ben Solo Needs A Hug, F/M, Fic Exchange, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Force Bond (Star Wars), HEA, Light Angst, Post TLJ, Quote: The Force works in mysterious ways, Rey Needs A Hug (Star Wars), Songfic, tros what tros
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-15 06:16:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29929161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Months after the Battle of Crait, Rey discovers that her bond with Ben has not broken. As they work to balance their less than ideal meeting times and personal grudges against one another, the pair happens upon common ground that still exists after all. Perhaps they care about each other more than they'd like to admit. Will their bond break the walls they've built up, or reinforce them?Or: Rey and Ben Force Skype their way into a reality where TRoS never happened.
Relationships: Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 5
Kudos: 11
Collections: Reylo Creatives: Anniversary Exchange 2021





	Step With Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reyloise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reyloise/gifts).



> This fic is written for the lovely Reyloise as a part of the Reylo Creatives Discord Anniversary Gift Exchange, so go check out the collection if you're interested in reading all the incredibly talented works! The full prompt was: "A fic or ficlet inspired by the MIKA song Step With Me (if its in canonverse then please make it canon divergent from TROS)"
> 
> Reyloise,
> 
> I am SO happy I got you for the exchange! You're such a shining light in the server. Your prompts were all so amazing that I honestly had a hard time choosing which to pick. I hope you enjoy it <3 Also, I would like to apologize for how short this first chapter is, and the fact that there's only one chapter out on exchange day! There is absolutely more to come very soon, if you check the chapter numbers ;)
> 
> Much love,  
> Your (Temporarily) Anonymous Gift Giver

Alone in the cool night air, Rey could hear her own heartbeat. She twisted her torso sideways, ignoring the way her sleeping bag scratched the branches beneath her. She’d felt them poking through for the past hour, undoubtedly making little white lines on her calves that would dry out or bleed by morning. Comfortable positions don’t exist these days—no matter how hard she tried, nothing put her to sleep. _You’re nothing,_ he’d said, practically whispered. His voice bounced around in her head every night like a pinball in a slot machine. No, not that—Poe would correct her in the morning. The point being that she couldn’t get it out. What was so appealing about being told you’re worthless?

Too far from the campfire to keep warm, Rey could feel her toes tingling and see her breath in the air. A strange sensation. The others drifted off seconds after settling in. She heard their snores from the east side of camp, even with the dining tables and all of Poe’s backpacks in between. Something to let her remember she’s not alone, that there were others here if she only craned her neck and listened for the deep grumbling that a stranger might mistake for an earthquake. Her friends. Snoring in the cool forest night.

What did it mean to be alone? Rey never felt alone before, not in this way. You can’t feel what you’ve never experienced. Can’t mourn for something you just never had, and yet… it hurt, knowing he wouldn’t come. It pained her every night, with each dusty breath that stole away her warmth and gave it to the trees. The ache never left. It only amplified with each syllable he pronounced in her mind, and with it grew her hatred for him. Or at least she assumed the feeling was hate.

The only thing she knew for sure anymore was that it’s easier to be alone than together. She pulled her arm out of the insulated bag and snagged a strand of grass from the ground, twirling it between fingers. The dew would form soon, an amalgamation of the humidity in the jungle air around her. Things were bright here. Rey could smell the sweet musk of the flowers even in the dark. Could hear the birds chirping in the trees, and in the daylight the lake to the north shimmered.

How long had it been since he’d seen a shimmering lake or watched a frog jump into it? Rey could imagine a lifetime. The joy it would bring—the joy it did bring her—had he ever felt that? Likely, it was so long ago it didn’t matter. And yet, when she watched those little miracles by the hour, she could never get the thought of him seeing it alongside her out of her mind. Rey didn’t think Ben Solo saw a lot of life’s tiny joys. Maybe as a child, but when had it stopped? When he became Kylo Ren?

_He stopped seeing joy a long time before that_ , Rey thought, feeling something sharp twist in her chest.

She tugged the sleeping bag tighter, trying to curl her body in on itself. Her number one rule of survival had always been to not sleep in the open—always find shelter. She’d rather be sleeping in the Falcon, where the beds were guarded by walls on all sides, but Leia was there tonight, as was Chewie, and she decided not to disturb them. For privacy. They deserved time to process.

On Jakku, she’d slept in her makeshift home, learning to fear the outdoors and what might lurk there at night. Deserts come alive when the sun dies. Jungles don’t seem too different. She could hear leaves rustling above, some creatures dancing through treetops and on the ground. How many of them were dangerous? Rey hummed and lifted her gaze, staring at the moon and the stars. Some of them were planets, she knew, far away. A lifetime away. She never wanted to see them all. With the Resistance, she might.

And here she lay, a speck of dust in the universe she stared at so intently. Alone.

Did she even want to be here?

Sometimes it felt like circumstance. It hadn’t been too long—two months at least, four at most. Rey wasn’t keeping track anymore. She just knew it was the longest she’d been away from her home, not that it really mattered. They truly aren’t coming back, are they?

“Are you going to sulk all night or get rest?”

Ben’s voice came so suddenly and so soon before the ringing in her ears that Rey jumped in her sleeping bag, gasping for breath. What was _he_ doing here?

She huffed. “I don’t see how that’s your problem.”

If Ben Solo wanted to annoy her, he should have done it sooner. She was sick of waiting around, imagining signs of a connection when reality told her it was the wind blowing her brains around in her skull. She waited months. The first, she hadn’t cared—if he came she would probably punch him—and the second she began to feel remorse. Now she grit her teeth and stared in his direction, wondering how he showed up at all. Not that she never wanted him to, but…

“I thought I cut you off,” Rey said, tilting her head.

“Guess not.”

He looked so out of place here in the jungle, so polished, pristine. The lighting on his face was dim, but not in the way the trees cast shadows on the ground. Fluorescent. He’s indoors. On a ship, somewhere. So he’s been playing traveling dictator.

“Go away, then.” A demand, to be clear about it. Rey turned on her side, facing the fallen log beside her instead of his strangely placed limbs, the sign that he wasn’t fitting with this environment. It was too alive for him.

“You know I can’t,” whispered Ben, his voice distracted.

“I don’t care what you _can’t_ do.”

He _could_ stay away for months. He _could_ refuse her hand and instead choose to take the path of most resistance—literally and figuratively. Ben could choose to do many things, so he better choose to stop bothering her. She was learning how to process _alone_.

For so long it was about what was missing from her life—her parents, her family. And throughout the past weeks, she had to rewrite her way of viewing the world. Everything looked different. She saw good where there was evil and evil in the good. The little girl from Jakku really had been so unimportant to her own parents, and where did it leave Rey? She glared at the ground, the echo from before haunting again. _You’re nothing._

“Why didn’t you come?”

“I’m not joining your side. This isn’t a game, Rey, it’s a war. We have different ideologies.” His voice was low, almost hard to hear since she wasn’t looking at him.

_No,_ Rey thought, _I mean, why didn’t you connect?_

She waited so long. On Crait—had she shut him out or did he choose not to appear? And why now? He said he couldn’t control it, but he seemed to have the timing down to meet her at her angriest and stay away when she actually wanted to see him. The nights spent alone hollowed her chest like a dig site with nothing worth taking home to sell.

_Nevermind._ He wouldn’t understand; she didn’t want a fight. The pain felt doubled, like she’d somehow experienced the whole thing twice. Bringing it up would only make things worse.

“What have you been doing...?”

Since Crait. Since they lost contact.

“Mm,” Ben said, mumbling something under his breath. She didn’t catch it. “Just busy. With things around here.”

“With the First Order.”

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

Rey hoped her sigh was audible through the bond and her scratchy sleeping bag. They can’t get into a fight here—not a physical one—so he’s avoiding her verbal attacks. He’s self aware, at least, of the consequences of his actions and the choices he’s made. And somehow, that made it worse.

If they can’t talk about the First Order, Rey wasn’t sure what else could be brought up. She’d planned this conversation time and time again in her mind, but the real thing didn’t compare. She still felt alone.

Communication—Leia said it was the answer to life’s biggest problems. Communicating with generals and captains, soldiers and supply runners. Friendships, too, Rey inferred, and perhaps Ben. Kylo Ren. Supreme Leader. Whatever he was calling himself lately.

But you couldn’t communicate with a brick wall, so it was time to take drastic measures.

“Why did you tell me I was worthless?”

“I didn’t. I said you were nothing.”

Appropriately, a frog chirped in the jungle trees, interrupting for comedic relief before Rey could lay into Ben. She didn’t have the energy, but something feral within her wouldn’t leave it alone.

She moved over onto her back, turning her head ninety degrees and piercing his wide eyes with her own. “You don’t see how those are the same _kriffing thing_?”

“I didn’t mean it like that, I- I meant… you didn’t have to be nothing.”

Didn’t have to? What, had he been offering her a way to become a somebody?

“Oh, so I’m worthless unless I join the First Order. Thank you. Really makes me feel better.”

“No,” Ben said, his voice drawing out and enunciating where it shouldn’t. “I _told_ you. You are not worthless. Being nothing doesn’t mean I view you that way, it just—” He cut himself off, staring at her instead as he tried to find the right words. He’d gone so long without being vulnerable that Rey imagined it could possibly be difficult. “Even though your parents treated you that way, I don’t see it the same,” he finally said. “Being alone… _that_ is being nothing. And you don’t have to be.”

The inflections in his voice were only so slightly off kilter, shaking with personal experience. Had her mind not been as attuned to recognize loneliness, she may have even overlooked it. Not once did his expression change. He didn’t even shift in his seat, as if he hadn’t spoken the most she’d ever heard from him under normal circumstances. If one could count this as normal, that is. There certainly wasn’t anything average about seeing one another from such a distance, across the stars and through lightyears of empty space. 

His confession tore at her heartstrings until they snapped. He still hadn’t given an apology for what he said—and admitting that she wanted one brought heat to her cheeks, tinting her whole face red—but the explanation of his words, as counterintuitive and backwards as they were, made a bit of sense to her. She wasn’t nothing in his eyes. Maybe she was everything.

And if being alone is to be nothing, then Rey should begin to rethink her lifestyle choices.

Ben stared up into the night sky, his head at an angle that looked utterly ridiculous from down on the dirt. The lines on his forehead, the small dimples in the skin of his cheeks. Is that how he understood so much about being alone? What had the life of Ben Solo been before Kylo Ren stole him away? Rey pursed her lips and relaxed in the sleeping bag, propping herself on an elbow to stare back, framing him as her moon and stars and everything in between.

If you’d asked her when she began to feel that way about the man she was meant to be at odds with in a galactic war, she wouldn’t have an answer for you. She just knew that a couple months ago she was cursing his name into her pillow at night, and now she was watching him watch something she couldn’t see because his real body was millions of miles away from here, likely on a ship in the Middle of Nowhere, Space, giving orders to blind soldiers who would try to slaughter her blind soldiers. She should feel guilty about it. She should be trying to entice information out of him. She should still feel mad and sad about how he treated her and refused his opportunity to come back to the light. But being alone felt so utterly devastating, so bone-crushingly terrible, that she sometimes felt like her lungs would collapse under the weight of her own rib cage. And to feel that someone was capable of actually understanding how physical the hurt was? How intensely it consumed her mind until all that was left became a speck of the original sun shining Rey?

She couldn’t control her crumbling defenses anymore, even if it was senseless.

Rey closed her eyes. She only ever wanted someone to listen and be there. Her parents, her friends, even a droid. Rey had great people in her life, but they didn’t get it. They said things like _that sounds hard_ and _you’re so strong,_ but they didn’t admit truths. Not ones like Ben just did. 

She had been treated like a nothing. Maybe that didn’t define her—it just defined her parents. Maybe Ben was right and she could be more. Not with the First Order, not with the Resistance. Rey would be enough, and if Ben Solo happened to join her one day, she wouldn’t pretend to be mad about it for long.

Rey opened her eyes and found a quiet jungle void of Ben, and the feeling that she’d mended a broken bridge to bring them both a little closer.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Comments/kudos are encouraged, let me know what you thought!
> 
> I hope I managed to capture my giftee's prompt request well <3
> 
> More to come! Remember, this is only step one, and less angsty times are around the corner (but not before we explore the angst, of course)


End file.
